Sikorsky says their Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft design will fly faster, with bigger weapons, than archrival Bell’s. Bell says theirs will be cheaper and more reliable.

Flying sideways, backwards, in pirouettes, and in a markedly quiet stealth mode, the hybrid helicopter-turboprop demonstrated the maneuverability the Army considers essential to survive high-tech future battles with Russia or China.

The company is confident that there is no inherent flaw in the design. Instead, they say, there was a software error that would have hamstrung any aircraft — and that error won’t happen again.

Dark horse design house AVX has never built a complete aircraft. The Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft competition just might change that.

Awards for Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft designs went to Bell, Boeing, Karem, Sikorsky, and a partnership of AVX and L-3.

The Sikorsky-Boeing super-copter has just over an hour of flight time, but the Army says it has all the data it needs to accelerate the program. How?

Bell’s prototype tiltrotor keeps pulling ahead of rivals — but the race to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk is far from over.

The thing that delayed Defiant, it turns out, is the same thing that makes it really attractive to the Army.

After years of secrecy and CGI, we’re finally getting to see the Sikorsky-Boeing dream team’s SB>1 Defiant ultra-high-speed helicopter in real life. Now they just have to prove it works.

While Bell’s rival V-280 uses tiltrotor technology, proven in widespread service on the V-22 Osprey since 2007, the Defiant uses Sikorsky’s revolutionary compound helicopter technology, which promises superior agility — but which has only actually flown in two experimental aircraft, the X2 and S-97 Raider, both of which are much smaller than Defiant.